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Re: Don't Cut Unarchived Lists...

>I would like to propose that we all place a self-imposed moratorium on
>cutting evidence from listserves which do not provide public archives.
>
>I think these sources may create large evidence problems, as they are
>unverifiable. If the list is archived, it seems fine, but for those which
>are not, teams have no way of accessing the original document being
>cited.
>
>Thoughts, feelings?

Sympathy with Deatherage's position on this, to a certain degree. He put
in his NDT judging philosophy last year that he doesn't consider net
evidence legitimate, because of its impermanence. How often do sites go
down? Think about any web-surfing jaunt you take, and the percentage of
links that don't connect because the page is no longer available. Archives
get wiped, too -- a couple of times the sysadmins here have contacted me
about the disk space usage of the NDT beast.

The one good thing about published works is that they never go down.
I don't fully agree with Deatherage on the illegitimacy of net evidence
because some of the unpublished papers on web sites are obtainable from
the author. If the author is willing to ship out a copy of an unpublished
work to anyone who requests it <Idso's books are an example> then I think
it's the equivalent of a published work for purposes of legitimate use as
evidence.

Listserv archives don't work like that. The author rarely keeps a copy of
her/his posts. <I'd have a file several terabytes in volume if I did.>
And even if someone else did, even if the team reading the cards had a
complete copy and was willing to share it, I would think that was a
dangerous setup. 99% of folks in the community have too much integrity to
"alter" the evidence <and/or the source> for their own purposes, but the
availability of the original from a neutral third party provides a check
on that <1% who don't.

Those're my thoughts. My feelings can be summed up as follows: it's too
*****in hot, and I wish the Olympics were over.

Doyle Srader
University of Georgia
<706> 548-9938
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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